Budgies and Bunnies

During my first visit to the pet shop to draw the fish, my attention was caught by the lively, brightly coloured budgies they had in the next room. I just had to go back there a second time to draw them.

I not only wanted to capture the vibrant colours, but also their movements and characteristics.

 

On the same trip to the pet shop, I also made some sketches of the English rabbits.

Dairy Cattle Studies for my upcoming Milk Packaging Illustrations

Brief: Produce illustrations for and create a brand new range of milk packaging aimed at both children and parents.

For my illustrations, I spent a morning at a local livestock market making studies of the dairy cattle being sold. I make sketches while I was there and took photographs to use for colour references later on.

I could not find a typeface that I was happy to use within my milk carton designs, so I designed my own, keeping the buttercup-filled grass theme in mind:

Milk packaging designs to come, once I photograph them!

Fish Studies: Exploring movement through drawing, watercolours and ink.

I set myself the personal brief of capturing the fluidity and movement of fish. I decided to use a local pet shop for reference so I took my sketchbook along to do some studies of their various types of goldfish. 

 

I was also interested to find out how I would illustrate their transparency using my watercolours, so when I got home I added colour to the sketches:

I wanted to recreate the sense of life my initial pet shop drawings had and so it was suggested to me that I work at a very large scale and draw with very fluid lines. I used India ink and a large paintbrush on A1 (ish) sized card to produce new, very large, fish drawings:  

 

I experimented on some of the large scale ones with coloured inks, before altering the black ink lines in Photoshop to add more colour:

  

I then wanted to see if I could simplify the fishes' design so I restricted myself to only a few lines:

One of the tutors at my university wanted a photograph of my ink-fish obsession for the blog, and got me to lay them out around the studio! You can get a feel for how big each piece actually is!  (Click for a bigger view)

After photographing the large ink drawings, I printed them at A4 and A3 and experimented with my watercolours on top of them:

I found that I wanted to add colour to the whole of the image including the black lines, so I used Photoshop to add colour and after scanning in some separate watercolour textures, brought the two elements together:

I was now feeling like I was getting closer to a more polished outcome with my ink designs. I then completed a series of compositions and patterns to show the finished fish designs off:

I played around with other colours too; such as these reds for the moors, but I found they weren't "watery" enough in comparison to their blue versions.

Strawberries!

I set myself the challenge to illustrate something tasty looking..I'm quite happy with how these strawberries turned out to be quite juicy-looking!

Spring Flowers

I decided to make use of the lovely bunch of Spring flowers I got sent to me for my birthday.